Seagate NAS Pro 4-Bay Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
Excellent performance combines with a handsome UI and a good list of features in this user-friendly prosumer and small-business NAS drive. Set-it-and-forget-it users will prefer it to a geekier, more tweaker-friendly multibay solution. Read More…

What We Liked…

Super-simple interface

Compelling performance

Great remote accessibility

Built-in LCD screen

Power on/off scheduling

What We Didn’t…

Not quite as full-featured as other "pro-level" NAS boxes

Few third-party apps so far

Can't batch-import users or groups

Seagate NAS Pro 4-Bay Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

So, you're thinking about buying terabytes upon terabytes to act as your home's or small business' main data repository? Storage ain't cheap—and we're not just talking about the physical hard drives that go into the network-attached storage (NAS) product you choose. Sometimes the bare shell is an investment in and of itself.

Take Seagate's new-for-2014 NAS Pro 4-Bay device. Bare-bones, without drives, it starts at $499.99. Our review unit came shipped with a whopping four 4TB drives. That's 16 total gigabytes of storage, all laid out by default in one massive 12TB array. It's a smidge pricey if you order one up from Seagate directly ($1,299), so we recommend, if you're economizing, that you just pick up the bare NAS Pro shell and order your hard drives separately. Given the fact that 4TB drives started at around $150 when we wrote this, you could save a few hundred bucks, depending on your specific storage needs.

We do like that Seagate allows you to configure the NAS Pro however you'd like when ordering it directly from the manufacturer. You can opt for a bare-bones NAS Pro with two bays or four bays. (Here, we tested the latter.) You can range that four-bay drive all the way up to a 20TB, four-bay iteration stocked with 5TB drives. And if that's not enough single-box networked storage for you, you can even opt for a different six-bay NAS Pro drive, which starts at $649.99 bare and allows for a maximum of 30TB of total storage if you stock it full with 5TB spinners.

So, to be sure: However many bays you buy, the NAS Pro will be something of an investment. That said, Seagate's NAS Pro 4-Bay will set you back about what you'd expect to pay for some of the best four-bay network storage devices around, including our Editors' Choice-winning QNAP TS-469L—assuming you don't want Seagate to stuff it with drives on your behalf.

But if you do go that route and let Seagate do the drive-populating, you'll enjoy the results. Our 16TB Seagate NAS Pro test unit coughed up fairly fast times on our transfer tests. Though it wasn't the speediest NAS box of its kind we've tested on all of our benchmarks, it was pretty close to the top on most of them. It was also generally faster than the non-"Pro" Seagate NAS 2-Bay we tested just before this model; we were pleased that the 5,900rpm hard drives that Seagate shipped with the device didn't bottleneck the NAS box's speeds in their default SimplyRAID setup, though there's also a bit more oomph to the NAS Pro's hardware versus Seagate's NAS.

Our review unit was a bit heavy when we filled it with hard drives—just around ten pounds, based on our "step on the bathroom scale while holding it" estimate. The NAS Pro box fit just fine on a bookshelf during our testing, measuring in at approximately 8.5x6x7 inches. While it may look a lot like its lesser companion, the Seagate NAS, at first glance, the NAS Pro comes with a few fancy additions that are obvious once you examine the device.

For starters, the NAS Pro has a helpful LCD screen on the front, the kind that we were pining for when we reviewed the Seagate NAS. You get two buttons to control it: an up arrow and a down arrow. We were a bit perplexed the first time we attempted to navigate through the screen's options, given that we could not find a button for executing commands and/or navigating toward submenus—or, in our case, accessing the menu's core settings. As it turns out, you have to long-press either the up or the down arrow to "select" anything. It works easily enough when you figure it out, though we wouldn't have minded a dedicated Select button on the face of the NAS box.

The LCD screen allows you to pull up the NAS box's IP address, check how much storage is used, and check its temperatures, among other features. It does react, however, with enough of a delay that we found it a bit annoying to interact with. We'd also rather that the NAS Pro just go right into its seven-feature list of data you can pull when you tap the up or down arrow the first time. Having to tap once for the NAS Pro to pull up an interstitial "press button" prompt, and then long-press that button again, is a bit tiresome.

We like that the NAS Pro's front face has four illuminated numbers that correspond to the device's four drive bays you are (or aren't) using...

Their LED-based lighting blinks in different ways and colors, delivering a quick status report on how your NAS box is doing—helpful, certainly. Installing new hard drives is a completely tool-free process thanks to the NAS Pro's drive bays; that, too, we liked. We also appreciated the inclusion of a USB 3.0 port on the device's front, which you can configure to be the source or target for the device's "one-touch backup" button on its front.

On the rear, Seagate's NAS Pro sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports—for small-business types who need the failover protection—as well as another USB 3.0 port and a USB 2.0 port. That's not as much as our Editors' Choice pick, which comes with two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, and two eSATA ports. While the latter might sound like overkill, and likely is for most users, we do appreciate the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach, given that NAS box's cost. While we're pleased to see a decent amount of functionality on Seagate's NAS Pro, we found ourselves wanting a bit more for how much we're paying for the bare-bones box. But then we thought about how that would add complexity; and reducing it is clearly the point of this unit.

We weren't able to find Seagate's NAS Pro when we loaded up Windows 8.1's File Explorer—at least, not listed as a device—so we had to download and use Seagate's Network Assistant app to get to the NAS box's Web-based configuration screen. On the plus side, the inclusion of the tiny LCD on the device's front does make finding the NAS box's raw IP address a lot easier, for those who would prefer to go about it the manual way (if you don't feel like assigning the NAS box a static IP on your network). After we initialized the device—more on that in a bit—the NAS box's storage volumes appeared within File Explorer just fine.

We didn't have any issues going through the NAS box's initial setup process, save one. While we appreciate that the NAS box checks for updated firmware before that first configuration is done, it was disconcerting to see our device pop up an error during the process. We had the same troubles when setting up Seagate's NAS 2-Bay a few weeks ago and, like before, we simply skipped the firmware check. Doing so allowed the setup process to finish and granted us access to the NAS box's primary Web-based configuration. From there, checking for new firmware via the NAS box didn't give us a single problem. (As an added bonus, our device's firmware was already up to date.)

Unlike our experience with Seagate's NAS 2-Bay, we weren't forced to input our device's MAC address to kick off the setup process—an unwelcome step that we're glad to see gone. We're not quite sure why this process was different for the Pro version of Seagate's NAS boxes, but we're not complaining.